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6. TheNorthAmericanPacificRim: AResponsetoFrankPasqualeandWilliamStahl

Patricia O’Connell Killen

I approach the Pasquale and Stahl chapters as an historian of religion, primarily of Christianity in North America, who has been working for some time on

understanding the religious dynamics of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.1 Most recently, as part of the Religion by Region project of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, I co-edited Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone 2 with Mark Silk. The volume provides a first take on two questions:

1) What is the religious configuration on the ground in the Pacific Northwest?

2) What difference does it makes for public life in the region?

As the volume’s subtitle suggests, the Nones, those whom the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) found claimed no religious identification, are prominent in this region. They make up 25 percent of the adult population in Washington and 21 percent in Oregon, combining to give this region the largest proportion of Nones of any in the United States.3 Further, according to Census Canada, 36 percent of the adult population in British Columbia identifies itself as having no religion.4

The North American Pacific Rim region and the questions of the Religion by Region project, then, are germane to the goal of exploring who is “secular” today by considering comparative geographic perspectives on the topic. Not only are the majority of the people in this part of the U.S. and Canada outside the doors of church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or any other conventional religious institutions; a substantial portion of the adult population has moved beyond even identifying with a religious family/heritage of any kind. Here the

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significant population of Nones, coupled with the demographic thinness of conventional religious groups, displays the erosion of the religious institutions and forms of individual religiosity that have shaped religious life in the West since the early modern period. Equally importantly, it signals the emergence of new forms of religiosity and more fluid forms of religious organization. The religious configuration and dynamics of this region, then, demand thinking anew about individual religiosity and about religion as a social and cultural force.

Frank Pasquale:“The Nonreligious in the American Northwest”

Frank Pasquale’s chapter offers a report on current ethnographic research he is carrying out in the Portland and Seattle metropolitan areas. He is exploring the beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of a group of adults whom he characterizes as the “affirmatively nots,” adults whom he understands to be explicitly irreligious and to hold explicitly secular worldviews. Pasquale’s Nots comprise approximately one-third of the Nones in Oregon and Washington, or about 500,000 adults out of a total adult population of slightly more than 7.4 million (a total population of 9.7 million). His larger estimate of 640,000, reached by taking percentages of adult respondents from ARIS and calculating an actual Not population from a figure for the total, not the adult population, seems a bit high. Further, as Pasquale himself notes about his own calculations, it is problematic to extrapolate from surveys that use the U.S. Pacific census region, which includes California, or from national surveys, to Oregon and Washington as a separate region.5

Disagreements with his calculations aside, Pasquale’s ethnographic research on the Nots makes a contribution to an understanding of the Nones by dint of his hard work on the ground: ferreting out an availability sample, identifying and counting groups, observing and interviewing their members, describing how Nots think, as well as their attitudes, the nature of their social relationships, and their public presence. His preliminary research shows that most Nots do not affiliate with “organizations pertinent to their metaphysical worldviews,” are reluctant to identity themselves with a label, though whatever description they give of their worldview emphasizes that it is naturalistic, and are ambivalent about committing to organizations lest they give away their independence of thought and action.

They share concern “about misrepresentation or misunderstanding of non-religious people, erosion of church-state separation, public and political influence of conservative religion, and aspects of American domestic and international policy.”6 The small minority who are in secular humanist groups, says Pasquale, “struggle for public recognition and legitimacy,” yet do not want to engage in recruiting or in forcing their views onto their children.7 Most participate

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publicly as citizens in “issue-specific collaborative groups or organizations.”8 They tend to be more action and issue oriented than they are interested in reflection on metaphysical topics.9

What is striking about Pasquale’s description of the Nots is how congruent it shows their attitudes and behavior to be with other Nones in the region, and in many ways, with the religious style of the region generally. This is true especially of two features of the Nots that his research highlights: their intense, ethically construed individualism and their “social skepticism,” defined as their “pervasive preoccupation” with “the destructive potential of human beings in groups and institutions, and how to overcome” it. They exhibit the strong impulse to free and unfettered activity and the ambivalence about social connections that has rendered conventional social institutions relatively weak in this region since earliest European-American settlement.10 Keysar and Kosmin report similar findings about individualism and loose institutional connections for Nones nationally.11

Where some of the Nots differ from the majority of Nones and the general population of the region is in their self-conscious insistence on articulating their worldviews in naturalistic terms.12 They consider worldviews that include a “supernatural” dimension highly problematic and define themselves over against people who hold this position. Whether and how to understand the Nots’ reflective construction of their worldviews as in some way “religious” or “spiritual” is at the center of Pasquale’s disagreement with the treatment of Nones in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest.

In the chapter “Secular but Spiritual,” Mark Shibley focused on the majority of the Nones, the 67 percent who agree strongly or somewhat that God exists.13 He argues that while all Nones are disconnected from conventional religious institutions both by identification and affiliation, the majority of Nones, the two-thirds who are religious by at least one conventional measure—belief—are spiritually open and so religious. Shibley proposes that, for the None majority, “Perhaps religious matters are simply experienced and expressed differently” in the region and goes on to employ a broad interpretive framework to “better illuminate the core values, ritual practices, types of transcendent experience, and forms of community that engage non-church-going Northwesterners.”14

Pasquale’s difference with Shibley over his choice to explore the majority of the Nones who are spiritually open rather than the minority of Nones who are affirmatively secular, even materialist, rests partly on Pasquale’s claim that the latter are distinctively and importantly different from other Nones. It also, however, raises an issue of definition. Specifically, in discussions of secularization, should naturalistic worldviews be considered religious or spiritual? Is reflective meaning-making a spiritual activity?

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Historically in the academic study of religion some naturalistic and nontheistic forms, such as Buddhism, have been included in the category of religion. In the academic study of spirituality, naturalistic worldviews also fit under the widely accepted definition of spirituality as a total, embodied response to life.15 Further, as Yves Lambert has noted in his “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms,” summarizing the work of Karl Jaspers, Joseph Kitagawa, and Robert Bellah, a radical demythologization, collapse of dualistic worldviews, and impulse to find meaning within history and the natural world are key features of the modernization process in which we live and affect religion.16

It is not accurate, today, to presume even that theists construe the world in terms of the natural and supernatural. Most forms of theism today are characterized by notions of this-worldly salvation. It seems, then, that establishing firm distinctions between the worldviews of the Nots, the spiritually open Nones, and many theists is more difficult than Pasquale suggests. His adoption of Kosmin’s categories of hard and soft secularism suggests that he himself recognizes the difficulty.17 Pasquale’s research and his disagreement with the treatment of Nones in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest point up the complexity of the relationship among “meaning-making” and the categories of belief, participation, identification, and behavior in understanding individual religiosity.

With regard to public life, as noted earlier, Pasquale’s Nots, like other Nones both regionally and nationally, as well as many theists in the Pacific Northwest, are reluctant to join civic or political organizations. They do so, primarily, to move forward an agenda regarding a specific issue that carries ethical import for them. As Keysar and Kosmin note, these specific issues increasingly are ideologically charged.18 This pattern of episodic public engagement on the part of even the most institutionally aversive, we argue in Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest, contributes to a larger individual and institutional religious sensibility that shapes the region, including less recognized dimensions of public life.

Based on his research to date, Pasquale’s Nots differ little from other Nones or even most theists in the Pacific Northwest. His research on the Nots is most valuable as a study of a limit case that sheds light on broader emerging trends and shifts across religion and culture. I hope he will carry the monograph that results from his research in that direction, perhaps along the lines of what the anthropologist Michael Brown did in approaching the deeper meanings of shifts in spirituality in the U.S. through channeling as a limit case. 19

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William Stahl:“Is Anyone in Canada Secular?”

William Stahl’s chapter shifts attention from close ethnographic research to much broader, complex national considerations, a take on secularization in Canada. Using both national and comparative provincial data on religious belonging, belief, and behavior, he argues that the contemporary Canadian situation is paradoxical. He notes that “self-identification with a religious organization is very high and ‘belief ’ in God is even higher,” but at the same time, “few Canadians attend a place of worship regularly and religion is conspicuously absent” from most of Canadian public life.20 His emphasis in the chapter is not on institutional secularization, the process by which religious institutions lose control over successive areas of human social life, but on the behavior of the people, and so he defines secularization as “a decline in people’s religious beliefs and practices” which he distinguishes from “institutional differentiation.”21

While acknowledging differences among provinces, Stahl argues that nationally, religious identification, religious practice, albeit frequently in non-traditional forms, and interest in spirituality remain high in Canada. Census Canada shows that in 2004, 81 percent of Canadians claimed a religious identification, the vast majority Christian. The relative market share of the three major denominations—Roman Catholic, United Church of Canada, and Anglican—and of the smaller set of evangelical churches has remained quite steady. Thirty-two percent of Canadians over the age of 15 “attend a place of worship at least monthly.” Nineteen percent of Canadians claim no religious identity.22 Those who claim no religion, Stahl points out, are primarily under age 30 and reside in British Columbia. Further, says Stahl, according to studies by Reginald Bibby, two-thirds re-affiliate with a religious body within ten years.23

Despite the growth in the number who claim no religion, Stahl argues that when affiliation and attendance are supplemented with data on private religious practices and the importance of religion in an individual’s life, the Canadian picture shows a relatively robust religiousness, albeit one that is increasingly disconnected from conventional religious institutions. He cites research showing that nearly 65 percent of Canadians engage in private religious practices at least a few times a year, with most of this group doing so at least monthly. Thirty-seven percent of those who attend services infrequently or not at all, engage “in private religious practices on a weekly basis.”24 Nearly three quarters of Canadians express having “spiritual needs.” One half of the Canadians who have no religion express spiritual needs. Those who do are interested overwhelmingly in “less conventional forms” of spiritual practice.25

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Bringing his data together, Stahl argues that, while the “number of people in Canada who would fit the ‘classical’ definition of being secular is quite small,” there is a significant shift occurring in religion in Canada. This is a shift, however, that in his judgment neither secularization theory nor rational choice theory adequately explains. Both of these theories are too rooted in specific historical settings, the former in Western Europe with its history of contest between political and religious institutions, and the latter in the United States, with its history of religious voluntarism and separation of church and state. Instead, argues Stahl, the data show a process of religious “disembedding” in Canada, a term he borrows from Anthony Giddens. Quoting Giddens, Stahl defines “disembedding” as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.” This process, Stahl says—following Charles Taylor—expresses “a central and ongoing characteristic of modernity.”26 It is best understood not as “the loss of community” or the “decline of religion” but rather as “the substitution of one moral order for another, complete with new forms of solidarity, authority, and trust.”27

Stahl’s conceptualization of the Canadian data situates the religious change going on there squarely within the larger frame of modernization theory, a move that advances the understanding of secularization by highlighting its multiple dimensions and the particular way that the process ensues in very specific historical, cultural contexts. His caveat that change in religious belief, identification, and participation does not equal secularization, is well taken. At the same time, I think Stahl may be underestimating the significance of institutional secularization for the trajectory of individual religious ident-ification and practice over time. Canada may well be undergoing a process of secularization not only institutional but also individual.

To advance this consideration I note the difference in the religious history of Canada and the United States, a difference that Stahl also emphasizes. As he says, the U.S. experience of religious “pluralism was grounded in an underlying, religiously based consensus.” In Canada, however, while there has not been “a state church since 1857,” neither is there “constitutional church-state separation.” Rather, religion in Canada has been a major point of political conflict and a foremost badge of identity. As Stahl puts it, “Religious conflict, together with the chronic lack of resources inherent in a small population spread over an enormous land, has bequeathed to Canada a relatively stronger institutional emphasis.”28

That emphasis, however, existed in part because religion, for the reasons Stahl noted, remained closely woven in with other ascriptive factors in individuals’

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lives until at least the 1960s. The strength of religion as part of a web of ascriptive factors was supported by the cooperative relationship between political and religious institutions. My question: what is the relative weight and staying power of Canadians’ institutional emphasis, including the current residual religious identification that is uncoupled from regular participation, when religious institutions themselves have contributed significantly to the secularization of the public sphere in Canada during the past fifty years? The historian Mark Noll, drawing on the work of Canadian historians and sociologists, including Reginald Bibby, notes that in Canada during the past forty years the ideology of pluralism replaced the traditional Christian ideologies of French and English Canada. “The social cohesion that the churches once provided is now offered by political and economic loyalties, an ideology of toleration, personal growth, and multiculturalism.”29

It is not clear to what kind of social cohesion these forces will lead. It does seem, however, with its “no religion” population overwhelmingly young—under age 30—and with only two-thirds of those re-affiliating within a decade, that we must consider whether Canada may be undergoing a slow process of individual secularization. That process may be the combined fruit of Canadian religious institutions having advanced a religiously inspired, but now independent, ideology of multiculturalism and the process of “disembedding” with its re-configuration of belief, belonging, and valuing.

Conclusion

Frank Pasquale’s and William Stahl’s chapters point up sharp changes in individual religious sensibility and practice that complicate and push a refinement of the understanding of who is “secular” today. Change, as Stahl notes, cannot be equated with secularization. At the same time, “disembedding”—the separation of religious belief, identification, and participation from a nexus of ascriptive factors—radically expands religious individualism and religious voluntarism. The more individualistic religion becomes, the more stretched the historic concepts of the secular and secularization.

Three more theoretical questions arise from these chapters:

• How should the nature of religiosity among the Nones, a population that construes its philosophical, metaphysical, or “religious” meaning-making as the project of individuals elaborating a worldview, primarily in naturalistic terms, and doing so mostly disconnected from religious institutions, be understood?

• How should the patterns of public participation, the public presence

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and effect, if any, of a population with a heightened sense of “social skepticism” and reluctance to make long-term institutional commit-ments, be understood?

• And what is the public, political, social presence and power of religion in relation to other social and cultural forces when its connections within a web of ascriptive factors are weakened or severed and it is “disembedded”?

Beyond these specific questions, however, is a larger possibility to be considered. Perhaps the Nones on the North American Northern Pacific Rim exhibit what Ernst Troeltsch argued would be the dominant form of religion at the end of the industrial period, inner-worldly mysticism.30

EndnotEs

1. I want to thank Professor Mark Shibley, Department of Sociology, Southern Oregon University, for providing his sociological expertise in conversation about the two papers. I am responsible for any errors in the interpretation of the sociological data in this response.

2. Patricia O’Connell Killen and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone [henceforth RPLPNW] (AltaMira Press, 2004).

3 See Ibid. at 28-29.

4. See William Stahl, “Is Anyone in Canada Secular,” Figure 5-3.

5. See Frank Pasquale, “The Nonreligious in the American Northwest,” p. 42-43.

6. Pasquale, p. 46.

7. Pasquale, p. 46, 52.

8. Pasquale, p. 49.

9. Pasquale, p. 50-51.

10. Pasquale, p. 49-52; “Introduction,” RPLPNW: 10-14.

11. Ariela Keysar and Barry A. Kosmin, “The Freethinkers in a Free Market of Religion,” p. 24, 26.

12. Pasquale, p. 49.

13. Mark Shibley, “Secular but Spiritual,” in RPLPNW: 143.

14. Shibley in RPLPNW: 139.

15. Joan Wolski Conn, “Dancing in the Dark: Women’s Spirituality and Ministry” in Robert J. Wicks, ed. Handbook of Spirituality for Ministers volume 1 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995).

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16. Yves Lambert, “Religion in Modernity as a New Axial Age: Secularization or New Religious Forms?” Sociology of Religion 60/3 (Fall 1999), quoted from <http://pro-quest.umi.com/pdqlink?did=45346863>, 3-4.

17. Pasquale, p. 46.

18. Keysar and Kosmin, p. 24, 26.

19. See for example Michael Brown’s trenchant analysis of broader trends in U.S. culture in The Channeling Zone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

20. Williams Stahl, “Is Anyone in Canada Secular?,” p. 59.

21. Stahl, p. 59.

22. Stahl, p. 60 and Figure 5-1.

23. Stahl, p. 62.

24. Stahl, p. 64.

25. Stahl, p. 66.

26. Stahl, p. 70, quoting Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990): 21.

27. Stahl, p. 70.

28. Stahl, p. 60.

29. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75:2 (June 2006): 258, 261.

30. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, reprint ed. (Louis-ville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992).